ABSTRACT
Counselors implementing a marriage and family counseling orientation use systems thinking in order to address and navigate the intricacies of today’s health care environment and to better comprehend the process of therapeutic change within a social and cultural context (Bittner & Corey, 2001). Due to both professional interest and health care public demand, the past two decades have seen extensive growth in family counseling;* supervision has also grown as a result of this demand (Lee, Nichols, Nichols, & Odom, 2004; Morgan & Sprenkle, 2007; Todd & Storm, 1997). e family therapy eld, and especially the American Association for Marriage and Family erapy (AAMFT), has placed special emphasis on supervision training and credentialing (AAMFT, 2005), so much so that supervision itself has become a subspecialty within family therapy. In addition, marriage and family therapists have identied best practices (Storm, Todd, Sprenkle, & Morgan, 2001) and have responded to the remedial and gate-keeping challenges in supervision (Russell, DuPree, Beggs, Peterson, & Anderson, 2007). In spite of these achievements, Morgan and Sprenkle (2007) note that “there is still little agreement about how to dene the scope and content of supervision” (p. 1). In their search for common factors in supervision, they observe that while there is an abundance of models, there is not enough empirical evidence to suggest greater ecaciousness of one model over another. Further, as Morgan and Sprenkle (2007) acknowledge, there is a “high degree of variation in denitions, tasks and models” (p. 1). e review presented in this chapter is based on the isomorphic nature of theory, in which the training practices of a model reect its theoretical and therapeutic approach.
